Blog

Mostafa, Darby, and Oscar led a PhenoCam training workshop for the NAU community, in which they: covered the basics of what a PhenoCam is and what the PhenoCam Network is;
showed participants how to explore the image archive through the PhenoCam website; and introduced various open-source tools to access imagery and derived data products. Later in the summer, the team will be offering a similar workshop at the annual ESA meeting in Long Beach, California. Great job, PhenoCam Training team!

This week’s ecoinformatics speaker was Nancy Kiang, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. During a whirlwind visit, Nancy gave back-to-back presentations — her ecoinformatics seminar, titled “Geometric optical radiative transfer as the link between remote sensing, plant canopy form and function for Earth System Models“, and the Department of Astronomy & Planetary Science (DAPS) colloquium, titled “System science for sparse exoplanet statistics: Habitability metrics from a ROCKE-3D perturbed parameter ensemble“; she also met with students and faculty, experienced some of Flagstaff’s finer culinary treats, saw the ACE Lab MICADAS, visited the Lowell Observatory, and toured the pueblos at Wupatki National Monument and the volcanic landscape at Sunset Crater National Monument. Thanks to SICCS and DAPS for co-sponsoring the visit.

In April, Mostafa attended the PhenoFeedbacks workshop in Dresden, Germany. The workshop centered on the impacts and feedback of phenological changes in the Earth system. During the event, Mostafa and colleagues from Germany, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and the USA collaborated on a plan for a review paper about phenological changes and feedbacks.

Lin Meng, an assistant professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University, visited the lab this week and presented her high-profile work on urban influences on tree phenology in the Ecoinformatics Seminar. She met with many students and faculty during her visit, and also visited Walnut Canyon National Monument with SICCS student Huilin Sun and lab postdoc Yujie Liu. Lin had previously invited Andrew to do a talk a Iowa State in 2019, which led to many productive collaborations.

The photo shows Andrew and Lin en route to a post-seminar lunch – thanks for your visit, Lin!

Second-year PhD student Oscar Zimmerman was recently awarded research funding through the NAU Support for Graduate Students (SGS) program, which is administered by NAU’s Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). The title of Oscar’s proposal is “Tracking the seasonality of woodland conifer trees using remote sensing,” and he will be conducting this work in piñon-juniper woodlands in the Southwest, including at the Cedar Mesa AmeriFlux site in southeastern Utah (a PhenoCam image from the site is shown below). Congratulations, Oscar!

Just before they put him on the shuttle to PHX, Andrew, Mariah, and Kivi took Paul for a late-season ski adventure at the Arizona Nordic Village. Conditions were marginal but the weather was fantastic and a good time was had by all. It was a great way to wrap up Paul’s visit, and an excellent reminder of the importance of maintaining a good work-life balance!

Congratulations to Jacob, who was awarded a summer fellowship to support his field research at the SEV LTER on the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge near La Joya, New Mexico. Jacob will be in residence at the nearby UNM field station, will mentor an REU student, and will be conducting chlorophyll fluorescence measurements in the MVE precipitation manipulation plots.

Paul Stoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and long-time collaborator on various FLUXNET projects, visited the lab for a week after spring break. Paul presented his ALIVE project, which uses high temporal frequency GOES-R data to model GPP in real time across North America, in the Ecoinformatics Seminar. In addition to meeting with many students and faculty at NAU, the lab organized a “tourist program” that included a visit to Walnut Canyon National Monument.

The photo below shows the large crowd that gathered for happy hour with Paul at Mother Road Brewing Co.

Andrew’s paper, “Experimental Whole-Ecosystem Warming Enables Novel Estimation of Snow Cover and Depth Sensitivities to Temperature, and Quantification of the Snow-Albedo Feedback Effect” was published in JGR Biogeosciences this week. The paper leverages the whole-ecosystem warming experiment at SPRUCE to quantify how snow duration, depth, and fractional cover vary with warming of up to +9°C. Every snow-related quantity examined was found to decline precipitously as the amount of warming increased. A paired-plot approach was used to estimate the magnitude of the snow-albedo feedback effect. Albedo-driven warming linked to reduced snow cover varies between December (+0.4°C increase in maximum air temperature) and March (+1.2°C increase) because of differences in insolation. A key take-home of the paper is that even modest future warming will have profound impacts on northern winters and cold-season ecosystem processes.

The figure below, from the paper’s supplemental information, shows the clear impact of warming on plot-level snow cover. Images were recorded during a drone flight on January 14, 2020.

Jen received funding from FLUXNET to support an in-person workshop, to be held during the summer of 2024 at NAU’s Hat Ranch field station, focused on measurements of canopy temperature using thermal imaging. The workshop has two goals:

1. Cross-Instrument Comparison & Standardization: Establish and test processing standards for thermal instruments through a field campaign, encompassing preprocessing, installation, and post-processing, to ensure consistency and reliability across devices.
2. Build Community Engagement around a ThermalCam Network: Enhance the accessibility and usability of thermal data within the broader scientific community, fostering a supportive network for sharing and innovation.

For more information, visit the workshop home page.

Congratulations to Jen and her workshop leadership team, which also includes Mostafa and SICCS PhD student Ben Wiebe, on obtaining this funding!